The Invertebrate Site Register

The early days

The Invertebrate Site Register (ISR) was
developed to raise the profile of invertebrate conservation in
Great Britain by acting as a fast track data and information
gathering tool. It was a runaway success producing a unique series
of publications detailing all the relevant information known at the
time about rare and scarce non-marine invertebrates. The
publications were in two 'series': county based accounts of
important sites and taxon based accounts of scarce and threatened
species.

The middle years

The ISR continued to be added to, but at a
slower rate, and continued to provide information to a broad
constituency. It became an established institution in its own right
and was regarded with envy by those working with other, similarly
neglected taxa, such as the lower plants, and by other invertebrate
conservationists in continental Europe.

At this time the whole issue of finding,
collating, interpreting and making use of information relevant to
nature conservation was in the process of revolution. The need has
always existed but the tools available were (and still are)
developing at a great pace. It was at about this time that the
thinking behind the National Biodiversity Network (NBN) began to
take shape. The ISR was, in essence, one of the prototypic elements
of the NBN (others include the ornithological information networks
e.g. WeBS and the common bird census as well as the well
established butterfly monitoring scheme).

Now

The ISR is no longer maintained as a central
database; each country agency keeps a national dataset and adds to
it. Archive material is held at BRC Monk's Wood.

In the process of developing the ISR Stuart
Ball developed a relational database to make the data work
efficiently. This has now developed hugely to become Recorder - a
standard setter in the field of data collect /collate
software.

The NBN is now established and well on its way
to functioning as, amongst other things, a data warehouse for all
taxa, including invertebrates. Many of the mechanisms used by the
ISR to agree access to data, agree levels of confidentiality, agree
who can have access to what level of information about given
species have now been formalised within the NBN. One important
difference between the ISR and the NBN is that the former aimed to
hold all the necessary information within a central database - at
the time this was the quickest and most efficient way to mobilise
the data. The NBN, by contrast, aims to link data and information
held by those who know it best: the originators. This applies to
information about species e.g. taxonomy, distribution or ecology,
as well as physical data such as SSSI boundaries, river courses or
county boundaries.

Material contributed to the ISR over the years
will become a part of the NBN, and will be available to the
conservation community.

Conclusion

The ISR set a precedent: it showed that taxa
that are data poor can, none the less, be assessed for conservation
status and that conservation action can be based on sound
principles - not the least of which is the precautionary
principle.